I went from saying, "if only they had an AMD" to getting a different machine in ARM and now im saying "if only they had ARM".

I never realized how much heat, vibration, air blowers negatively affected me before. A framework laptop with some type of ARM or ARM-like cpu could do a lot with the space savings on cooling.

I've played with an AMD 6800u laptop and I would say it's the ideal x86 laptop chip right now. Normal usage at the 12w mode or light gaming at 20w mode was super impressive. Even though 12th Gen Intel chips have made great performance gains Intel is still relying on unsustainable high turbo boosts to get the benchmark numbers.

I just recently stumbled across these two otherwise identical laptops.

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_...

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_...

The AMD version is rated for 20% greater battery life just from the CPU difference.

I have been using a 6800U on Linux for the past two weeks. With kernel 5.18 almost everything is supported out of the box. The few issues I have:

- Kernel logs show that the GPU driver crashes from time to time. When it happens the screen freezes for a few seconds but recovers.

- HVEC hardware decoder gives green artifacts on VLC using VA-API.

- It seems not to support advanced power management, on battery the CPU will happily boost to 4.7 GHz which in my opinion makes little sense. AMD has been steadily pushing work related to power management so I expect it to improve. As it stands total power consumption on battery averages 5.1 W.

AMD does automatically switch to a "power saving" profile on battery that lowers power consumption significantly vs on charger, but if you want, you can tweak even further with a fantastic tool: https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj - it's a simple CLI util so easy to set up w/ udev rules to run automatically. On my old Ryzen laptop, I have it set to run `ryzenadj -f 48` when I go on battery, which limits the temperature below my laptop's fan hysteresis for a very efficient and totally silent system, and `ryzenadj -f 95` to set it back, but you can also adjust most power and clock parameters (not everything works on Ryzen 6000 yet, but the basics should). The docs/wiki are also great and has lots of charts illustrating what each setting does: https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj/wiki/Renoir-Tuning-Guide

The other tool you could check out (and use in conjunction or instead of ryzenadj) is a tool called auto-cpufreq: https://github.com/AdnanHodzic/auto-cpufreq - it lets you switch governor and turbo/clock speeds automatically base on battery if you're just looking for a simpler way to set that.

5.19 has a bunch of amdgpu fixes that might fix some things https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2022-April/... but sadly there are often also sometimes regressions/weird bugs: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues?page=90&sort...